Helios Release Highlights

Graduation

Acceleo graduates with its Helios release. This usually means the plugin grows from version 0.x to version 1.0. However, Acceleo already has a version history and an existing adopter community. In order not to unsettle this community and to stay coherent with our history, Acceleo will jump under eclipse from version 0.8 to version 3.0 (as the last released version on Acceleo.org was 2.x).

New and noteworthy

- Tooling improvements

New views have been introduced to help you on several aspects of the generation cycles
The Result view to get feedback on the traceability information
The Overrides view to easily create templates overriding others
Acceleo now provides a built-in profiler, a advanced debugger and a stack trace mechanism for runtime exceptions
Acceleo 3.0 is compatible with Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede), Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) and Eclipse 3.6 (Helios)

- Editor Improvements

Performance improvements
Basic refactoring actions
The usual shortcuts (ALT+SHIFT+R) to rename either modules, templates, queries, variables...
Portions of text can be extracted as new templates
The editor now highlights all occurrences of the selected element
Quickfixes are available to fix compilation issues by creating new module elements
New menus and quick fixes to wrap Java extension points (Java services)
Bottom-up approach when developing generators
Initialize the content of the generator with an example
Specific actions to transform an example in dynamic OCL expressions

- Improvements on the language

Full MTL/OCL standard library implementation
Build mode, either Strict or Lax MTL compliance
Migration facilities for those who own Acceleo 2.x templates

Quality of APIs

The component lead certifies that the requirements for Eclipse Quality APIs have been met for this release.
All non-API code is in "internal" packages.

End of Life Issues

None

Committer Diversity

4 Committers from Obeo, and 2 individual committers.

IP Issues

The about files and use licenses are in place as per the Guidelines to Legal Documentation.

All other contributions (code, documentation, images, etc) have been committed by individuals who are either Members of the Foundation, or have signed the appropriate Committer Agreement. In either case, these are individuals who have signed, and are abiding by, the Eclipse IP Policy. The other contributions of the IP log are not significant or are written 100% by employees of the same employer (Obeo) as the Submitting Committer (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/EclipseLegalProcessPoster.pdf).

All contribution Questionnaires have been completed.

The "provider" field of each plugin is set to "Eclipse Modeling Project".

The "copyright" field of each plugin is set to the copyright owner.

Any third-party logos or trademarks included in the distribution (icons, logos, etc) have been licensed under the EPL.

APIs

Metamodel definitions and corresponding implementations are considered APIs.

Commitment to provide stand-alone code generation.

Non-API classes are separated from the exposed API through an "internal" package.

API Tooling is activated on all plugins to mark exceptions within the exposed API.

Documentation

The documentation that comes with Acceleo 3.0 is available in the Help menu : Acceleo Model To Text Transformation Language.

Each document of the documentation set deals with a different aspect of mastering Acceleo :
There are a Plug-in Overview, a Quick Start, an Android Code Generation Tutorial, a User Guide, several short tutotials to create code generation projects, an Acceleo/OCL operations reference to describe the Acceleo/OCL library, and a Text Production Rules document.

The main documentation is the User Guide because it fully describes each and every feature of Acceleo. From the installation to the execution with a trip through the editing features, it gives an in-depth description of everything there is to know about Acceleo.

Basic Examples are available in the example category : UML to Java, and Ecore to Python.